The CC Effect can really freak me out sometimes. No sooner had I finished the post on the Pine Opalescent Mark VI, and what else do I see on the Bay of E? An even rarer 1981 Town Car coupe–in Pine Opalescent! Wow!

It’s a good thing I already have the recently-acquired ’00 Town Car, because this car presses all my buttons–not the least the fact that it is a two-door version of my childhood neighbor Phil’s ’80 Continental.

This is another little-loved Panther–the Continental coupe/Town Coupé/Town Car coupe of 1980-81. Very few were sold, and it is the rarest 1980-89 Panther Lincoln by far. In 1980, the car was offered in Continental Coupe (standard model) and Town Coupé (premium model). But in 1981, all Continentals were renamed Town Cars. Thus did the former trim level become the model name. So, the 1981 version of this car became the “Town Car coupe” or “Town Car Signature Series coupe.” Got it?

The pictures for this one are not as extensive as the ’81 Mark VI’s, but it is clear that this is also a well-maintained, much-loved car. And don’t those seats look comfy? No lateral support? Bah! This is not the car for gymkhanas! That’s why you need a two-car garage, so you can have a nice old MGB or Miata to zip around in when the mood strikes.

Please note that this car, like the Mark VI, also has the Premium Sound option with 8-track and LCD display. This was the tail-end of the 8-track’s availability on new cars, as cassette decks had been taking over since at least the mid-’70s. By 1981, I wonder how many people ordered these? Probably folks who had purchased a ton of 8-track tapes in the ’60s and ’70s!

So let’s review: Lincoln? Check. Green? Check. Broughamy? Double-check! Yes, this car is quite attractive to an old American luxury car lover like me! And although the car has since sold, I wish the best to its new owner, and have a message: Please take care of this nice old coupe. She deserves it!

If your interested i have a white 81 Town Car Coupe with burgundy velour interior.
It also has the AM/FM 8 track and has the built in CB radio.
And in just as good of condition and it is all original with only 95000 miles

Wow, total CC effect! For some reason, I actually prefer these to the Mark VI, as I feel the proportions work better and the overall “square” styling is at least very consistent. I love the fact that this one is in such a unique color with velour upholstery, gobs of fake wood and an 8-track–a real period piece. I have only seen one of these in person ever. It belonged to the mother of a girl at my high school, and it looked identical to the light blue/dark blue vinyl landau car in the Lincoln catalog shot.

No Sale! OK, Mr. Klockau – I see your nefarious plan. First you get me to admit that MAYBE I could stomach a Mark VI in the right color and condition. Then you play your trump card – my most hated Lincoln ever in the same color and condition. Well, my tricky internettist, I’m not falling for it.

Spend a little time in a big, cushy REAL Lincoln like the 78 Town Coupe, then come back to this car. This is what my father did. Even identical color combo (white car, cordovan/burgundy velour interior). Oddly, after this Town Coupe, he never bough another full sized Lincoln. A Fox Continental and a V8 Taurus Continental, but never another Town Car.

Everything about this car felt cheap and flimsy compared to the 78. Plus, going from a 460 to a 302 (hobbled further by the AOD) was almost torture. President Carter told us we were going to have to be satisfied with less, and this Lincoln proved it.

Seriously, this is an extremely rare car in beautiful condition. It will make someone a very nice plaything. However, the early Panthers are full of strange and highly breakable things, and are also really awkward looking. I don’t start to warm to these cars until maybe 1986-7, so I will leave this one to someone else.

To what degree did even the Town Car suffer in the early ’80’s? There was a convergence in the mid ’80s that really made the Panther a success – all three versions received fine tuning that made them better, the public got used to them, and they were the last men standing after the Mopar R bodies went away, the RWD GM B’s and C’s faded, and the engine mess at Cadillac.

Count me in full agreement with jpcavanaugh – a little liked car in wonderful condition in a great color. I have a 67 coupe and a 78 Town Coupe – no comparison in ride, power, and quality to these early 80s versions.

All that being said i hope the owner is a Lincoln Continental Owners Club member and that we’ll see the car at some of our meets……..

They certainly look like the Kelsey-Hayes wheel that they sold for factory installation to Chrysler, GM and IHC. The Panther does use the same 5 x 4.5″ bolt pattern that Chrysler used while GM and IHC never used them so yeah they are from a Mopar. The early Box Panthers did come with 14″ wheels with 15″ becoming an option for few years until they became standard.

I think the color is pretty but the car itself is ugly and very awkward with 2 door instead of 4. You can guess why this style was not popular. In 1984 the Mark VII arrived and the Mark VI and the Town Coupe were replaced and not a moment too soon as the Mark VI and the Town Coupe were nothing but ugly blah cars that happily got sent to the dustbin of history.

To be fair I love the 1980-1989 4 door Town Car as I think it was very stately looking and well cared one nowadays still looks crisp. This is a big contrast to the 1990-1997 Town car which was also a BAC(Blah Assed Car) which was plain as crap and made you want to buy a Crown Vic or Grand Marquis due to the modern look of them.

But big coupes are not as popular as their 4 door counterparts. Even in the world of the sainted GM B Body, nobody is waxing nostalgic about a B Body coupe.

The digital 8 track player was still popular in Fords at that time. The 8 track was still being made(albeit in lesser amounts) and you could still get new titles via a music until the end of the 1980’s(some say the last 8 track offered was Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits (1988) )

As for when the last 8 track player came out, it is ether 1983 or 1984. I know you could get a 8 track player in the 1983 Rampage but I think that an 8 track player was an option in the 1984 Town Car.

While we are talking about old Lincoln’s and 8 track players, here is another pic of the digital display 8 Track Player I bought for $5 at the junk yard. It came from a 1979 Lincoln Versailles

“But big coupes are not as popular as their 4 door counterparts. Even in the world of the sainted GM B Body, nobody is waxing nostalgic about a B Body coupe.”

Some of those coupes were pretty nice, I had an ’82 Delta 88 Royale Brougham 2 door that I thought was a knock out, and the rear seat was decently useful.

Caddy sold more Coupe DeVilles than Sedans in the early ’70s. I can see why the coupe died in general – as they downsized the rear seat became utterly useless in most of them. But, it is surprising that the Panther and B and C coupes did fade away in their time.

The doors on the B-coupes were very large, I’m not sure how much so compared to the ’76 and earlier models but they were big, which might be part of the reason. On my ’87 Caprice they’re a full five feet long, and getting out in tight parking spots is a challenge, along with closing them sometimes. The tradeoff is the styling and my favorite, the airy window openings, opened or closed. Back seat area is great as you noted.

Does anyone know whether a Quadrasonic tape deck would play standard 8-track tapes? Or did they play only the quad (four-channel) tapes that were available only for a short period in the 1970s and only for a limited selection of titles?

quite automatic, the two tapes were shaped differently- if you have a tape player that could play quad you simply put the quad tape in, the tape player recognized the notch in the tape and played it accordingly

@ Eric VanBuren- it was 4 channel in the sense that it played quad-tapes

@ gottacook – all quad decks can play stereo tapes- typically there is a switch to change from quad to stereo-I guess ford did it automatically

gottacook

Posted November 6, 2013 at 10:11 PM

A standard 8-track tape loop has four equal-length programs all on the same length of tape, played back as tracks 1 and 5 (program 1), tracks 2 and 6 (program 2), etc., with the “kachunk” indicating change of playback head position in response to the foil tape that joins the splice. If the quad tape layout was, as I assume, tracks 1, 3, 5, and 7 (program 1) and tracks 2, 4, 6, and 8 (program 2), then each of the two playback head positions on a quad deck could have been wired to play back each of the two pairs of tracks on a standard tape (for example, the playback head in program 1 position could play back either tracks 1 and 5 or tracks 3 and 7). What I’m curious about is how automatic this function was.

8-track tapes disappeared from most U.S. record stores around 1982 or 1983, and most U.S. record labels had stopped selling them by 1984. They were kept alive for a few more years after that by the Columbia (later Columbia House) and RCA (later BMG) music clubs, however. I’m not sure if this was a strategy they planned out or if it just kind of happened, but the two of them seemed to gather together what little demand remained for new 8-tracks — which was likely made up mostly of people with older cars with 8-track players — and kept making them until the demand had basically completely dried up. The record clubs manufactured most of their own product through their parent companies (Columbia Records and RCA Records), so they could keep having 8-tracks made even after they ceased to be available through other channels.

The last record club 8-tracks were made in 1988. Not every album was available until then, just select titles (major hits, albums the record clubs thought would be of interest to the demographic that bought 8-tracks, etc.; whether a title was available at all, and which club(s) it was available through, was also dependent on whether a particular club handled a particular record label). Fleetwood Mac’s “Greatest Hits”, which was out in the fall of 1988, had to be among the last titles ever released.

My mother had quite a selection of 8 track tapes, and was chagrined to have to change over to cassettes in the 80s when her 85 Crown Victoria came so-equipped. My 77 New Yorker that I owned at the same time had an 8 track player in the dash. Unlike mom, I had no 8 tracks, and had to buy an adapter to play cassettes in it. Now, we have been in that same changeover between CDs and MP3 jacks in car stereos over the last decade. I wonder what’s next.

Around 1983 (when I would have been about 12 or 13), my father bought a used 1976 Ford Club Wagon, which had a working 8-track player in it. We had never owned any 8-track tapes, but I remember that he bought a bunch out of a discount bin somewhere; this would have been around the time 8-track tapes were being eliminated from stores. He later got one of those cassette adapters so we could listen to cassettes in it, but it never seemed to work right. The tapes always seemed to play slightly off-speed.

Aside from the Club Wagon, I don’t think my parents ever owned a vehicle with a tape player of any kind until my dad replaced the Club Wagon in 1989 with a new GMC S-15 Jimmy, which had a cassette player.

Incidentally, he still had the Jimmy until about a month ago, although it hadn’t seen much use over the past few years. Its rear cargo area was used to collect trash, then it would be driven to the transfer station once a week.

personally, a 98 up Crown Vic coupe would be number one on my must find list…if they had ever made one…had a 79 Oldsmobile 88 coupe and always liked the 80 up Caprice two doors..but the 4.6 and P71 suspension would make a Vic coupe awesome.

I’ll be an odd man out and admit I prefer the ’80-’84 Continental-Town Cars and Continental-Town Coupes to the ’85-’89s. At least, appearance-wise. I do like the sharp corners and the subtle difference between the older and newer front end. While I agree with Mr. Cavanaugh that they don’t hold a candle to their ’75-’79 predecessors, I do think they’re pretty cars and this is one heck of a color.

That said, for the same reasons some others have mentioned–the VV Carb, the AOD (I had it in my ’87 Crown Victoria, it sure was jerky), the questionable electronics–I would probably pass.

Its like old home day, that interior takes me back, my old man had a sedan Mark like yesterdays green one, but black, with the “Quad” 8 track and the big pull knob for “Premium Sound”, we had the bank o computer buttons on the ridge of the dash that allowed you to run the trip computer. It was two tone silver over black with the wires, it looked sharp, but I preferred the brown 79 Eldorado a little more, the Lincoln was just so soft, and it had that tiny little Ford steering wheel.

I saw a sedan version of one of these earlier in the year – I thought it must have been based on the Fox platform from the size of it. Perhaps it was just the comically-oversized fender blades (or whatever they should be called) and the grille being too tall for the size of the car that gave me the wrong impression.

If you look closely, the similar sized 1979 Mercury Cougar ZR-7 2 Door Coupe had a very strong resemblance to the 1981 Lincoln Town Coupe 2 Door Coupe front end namely the grille arrangements and headlights.

I had a 1980 lincoln town coupe
Black and pewter that my parents
Bought brand new
I drove this car in the mid 80s to
Highschool and have been looking for one for years.
Had 350w motor gray interior
With cassette player
Lot of memories in that car.